Create tileable / seamless textures in Photoshop (Method 2)

In this tutorial, I am going to show you another technique on how to create tileable or seamless textures. As we have already discussed in this article that there are some textures that can’t be tiled using offset technique. So I am sharing my technique how I generally deal with these types of textures to make them seamless or tileable. Enjoy.

Step1

Here I have a chain link fence image that can’t be tiled using the offset technique. In these types of texture a small and common unit of pattern repeats itself vertically and horizontally to make a complete texture. You can easily notice that how a common interlocking wire pattern repeats itself many times to make a complete chain link fence image. So instead of making the whole texture image seamless, we will select that common repeating pattern of the texture and work on that to make it seamless.

Step2

Here, I have some area selected and if we repeat this area vertically and horizontally then it will gives us the complete chain link texture but there are some points that are not matching correctly so the texture may not be seamless. We need to fix these points in order to avoid seams.

Note: I have some guides on a separate layer so that I can easily match those points correctly according to these guides.

Step 3

You can use Liquify Filter or Warp (Edit > Transform > Warp) the pattern to match these points. I need my guides while tweaking this up so I am using my guide layer as backdrop in Liquify. You can toggle backdrop by pressing P key on your keyboard.

Step 4

Now, copy the tile and paste it to the new document. To get rid of the background just select the Magic Wand Tool (W) from the toolbar and select the background and delete the selected pixels.

Step 5

After removing the background, your texture tile will look like this. Now, go to Edit > Define Pattern… to create a pattern, give it a name and press OK.

Note: If the dimensions of your texture are too large then you can reduce the size of the texture before saving it as pattern.

Step 6

Now, create a new document having dimension 800×600 px then go to Edit > Fill… (Shift+f5), it will bring up the fill dialog box. Under Contents group, set the dropdown to Pattern and select the custom pattern that we just saved. You can also use Pattern Overlay Layer Style to test the pattern.

You can see how our texture is tiling without giving any seam. Now, you can use this texture for your games and projects.

That’s all. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new from it. Your comments, problems and suggestions are welcome. Good Luck.